Yes, We’ve Been Talking a Lot More About Twerking Than Syria on Twitter

Image: Floating Sheep

Late last month, as the risqué performance of Miley Cyrus at the MTV Video Music Awards and the ongoing conflict in Syria were both reaching their respective levels of international importance, The Onion ran a humor piece that purported to be written by the managing editor of CNN.com, and offered a satirical explanation for why Cyrus’ “twerking” had been granted the top spot on CNN’s online front page instead of Syria:

It’s a good question. And the answer is pretty simple. It was an attempt to get you to click on CNN.com so that we could drive up our web traffic, which in turn would allow us to increase our advertising revenue. There was nothing, and I mean nothing, about that story that related to the important news of the day, the chronicling of significant human events, or the idea that journalism itself can be a force for positive change in the world.

It was a joke, but it was spot-on in more ways than one. According to the latest research from Floating Sheep, a team of academics that analyzes geo-coded Twitter data, for the time period between July 1, 2012 and Sept. 11, 2013 there were 75,000 tweets in North America that mentioned Syria; by contrast, some 775,000 mentioned twerking.

“These numbers have changed significantly over the past month as the U.S. has called for military strikes in response to reports of chemical weapon attacks in Syria,” Floating Sheep’s Matthew Zook wrote in a blog post accompanying the group’s latest findings, noting that there has been a nearly tenfold increase in Syria tweets since July. “But nevertheless there have still been three times as many references to twerking as Syria in August and September, with 133,000 tweets against just 43,000.”

Image: Floating Sheep

What’s even more interesting is where those discrepancies are the strongest within the United States. Looking at what the researchers dubbed the “Twerkyria Index,” they found high concentrations of tweets about twerking in Midwestern states like Ohio and Kansas. In the Southeast, in a range of states stretching from South Carolina to Texas, there were four times as many twerking tweets as Syria ones. While the tweets from the South make sense — the term “twerking” originates from the region’s bounce culture, after all — the interest from the Midwest is more difficult to explain. Meanwhile, Washington, D.C. totally bucked the trend; it had more than three times as many Syria tweets as it did twerking ones.

While the data can’t illustrate the exact context of all the missives, the researchers still think there was value to investigating the relative social media interest in the two terms. “The relationship between twerking and Syria seemed worth evaluating as news outlets spent air time focusing on the variations of the twerking trend over the last two months while a potential war was brewing,” said Floating Sheep researcher Monica Stephens, a geography professor at Humboldt State University, in an email to WIRED. “Some of the conversation about Twerking has been really interesting from a race/gender perspective, and we were curious about how this fits into the geographies of social media.”